Dear Michael:

You wrote:  “(I hate being needy)”- can you elaborate on what “being needy” means to you and what you hate about it?

You are stuck on “how to prevent those anxious thoughts from hurting my confidence or putting me back into a cycle of unhappiness and neediness”- will attend to this later, if you respond.

And you wrote that you are “trying to rediscover the line between anxiety and my actual needs and desires”- our actual need is to be well, to experience peace of mind, reasonably, to be okay. Anxiety is not congruent with well-being, peace of mind. So your actual need, I believe, is to manage and heal your anxiety.

anita